I am constantly working on new ideas. And ideas do best when they are shared. For a long time, creating a product website, personal page or a quick landing page was a chore. Sure, I could do it by applying my coding skills but it was neither pleasant, fast nor efficient. In this short article I want to share a gem of a service I've recently found.
First websites for my products were just free templates hosted on GitLab Pages (great free hosting by the way). It was OK but required some work from my side and never really matched my expectations. At the same time I didn't want to put that much effort into designing them. Because of that, I hired a friends’ software house to create a website for my startup. I used it as a base for two other websites but even with all the automation I introduced, after some time I didn’t feel like the design was working for me anymore.
So I decided to pay up for a subscription and tried WIX. I really tried to make it look good but there weren't really any good templates for my use case. Additionally, the layout editor was so bloated that using it was a pain. The website was looking weird on some devices. I was ashamed to send this website to my clients. The only thing that came out of it was me paying for a yearly subscription for one of my websites.
I googled, read, watched YouTube and finally somewhere, someone mentioned carrd.co.
It was a revelation.
Carrd.co has some great looking templates, great SEO optimisation, short page load times, good support and importantly an affordable yearly plan ($19/year Pro is what you're looking for, as it includes custom domains).
As an example, have a look on my startup's website - sentimatic.io.
Carrd includes essential features like contact forms, newsletter signup forms for the most popular services and also has many features I haven't tried yet. These include stripe payments, typeforms and others
It isn't all perfect though. I wasn't satisfied with scaling on some resolutions, the subpage implementation is really basic and kind of awkward (but hey, it's there!) and overall features are a bit limited. The last one is actually a benefit for me, as I don't get distracted and avoid analysis paralysis. One major issue, however, is a lack of multi language support. I bypassed it by creating another website (or carrd to be exact) and including links to a version in other language in the visible place. It's good enough for me.
I highly recommend Carrd.co if you need to quickly set up a good looking page. It saved me a lot of money, time and was an overall good experience.
If you like the idea as much as I do, try carrd using this link or use my referral code at checkout 82DXK6L9. (I get a small commission from that). And be sure to follow me on twitter @horosinov.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Carrd in any way other than joining the open referral program.
